My first meeting at Converse was a 50-person standup. The scrum lead had every engineer type their status into an application. She would present it. Then they would read it off the screen, one by one, as the rest of us watched. Twenty software engineers. Six QA. Status after status after status, read aloud, to an audience that could have just read it themselves. That was my introduction to the team I was inheriting.
I came in hot.
I had just helped double e-commerce revenue at Life is Good. Before that, I spent five years at a digital agency where my whole job was to fly in, diagnose what was broken, and fix it. I had a playbook and receipts to back it up.
What I didn't have was patience.
The loudest voices at Converse were overwhelmingly negative. Product and engineering had a broken relationship. The previous leadership had churned. There was a contracting partner that almost nobody wanted to work with. Every conversation I was having confirmed the narrative ... this team was struggling, the dysfunction was obvious, and I was here to fix it.
So I started fixing it.
I focused on the allies I was building. I performed the fix instead of finding it.
The problem was that I had never actually taken the time to assess the fire. I was reacting to smoke. I was listening to the loudest voices, which are almost never the most accurate ones, and I was building coalitions around a diagnosis I had made in my first two weeks. I thought that was leadership. What I was actually doing was skipping the most important work.
The Historians Are Not the Ones Talking
Michael Watkins has written about this extensively ... the research on new leader transitions is consistent across industries. Most new leaders overshoot in the first 90 days because they mistake activity for progress, and they mistake the loudest voices for the most accurate ones. It is not a knowledge problem. It is a patience problem dressed up as urgency.
Every team has two kinds of people. The ones who tell you what's wrong immediately, loudly, with a list ready. And the ones who wait.
The ones who wait are usually two to three layers down in the org. They've been there long enough to know what was actually tried, what failed, why it failed, and which part of the failure everyone has conveniently forgotten. They have context that predates the current dysfunction by two or three years. Nobody asked for their perspective, so they stopped offering it.
I call them historians.
At Converse, I found them late. Too late to avoid the mistakes I'd already made, but early enough to understand them. I found them not by looking for them specifically, but because I eventually started doing the thing I should have done from day one ... one-on-ones at every layer of the org. Full-time employees. Contractors. People two levels below me who had no particular reason to think I cared what they thought.
The historians have context that predates the dysfunction by years. Nobody asked for their perspective, so they stopped offering it.
When I finally sat with those people, the picture got complicated in exactly the right way. The gray area appeared. Things that had looked like engineering failures turned out to be product decisions made under constraints nobody had explained. Things that looked like individual performance problems turned out to be systemic issues that predated everyone currently in the room. The narrative I had inherited from the loud voices was not wrong exactly. It was just incomplete in ways that mattered enormously.
The historians weren't going to volunteer that information to someone who seemed to already have their mind made up.
The Cost of Skipping the Listening Work
I made my early allies very happy. And I tripled the amount of work I had to do later to rebuild trust with the people I had not listened to.
I sat with people. I listened. I owned what I had gotten wrong without looking for an exit from the accountability. I apologized where apologies were warranted, and then I actually changed how I was operating. The relational debt from moving too fast in those first 90 days took significantly longer than 90 days to pay off.
The deeper problem is the posture you walk in with.
I walked into Converse with an agency posture. At an agency, you are brought in specifically because you have answers. Clients pay you to arrive with a point of view. That posture is a genuine asset in that context and a liability in almost every other one.
When you inherit a team, you are not a consultant. You are not there to deliver a diagnosis and a deck. You are there to earn the right to lead these specific people, with their specific history and their specific understanding of what is actually broken. That takes time you cannot accelerate by being smart.
What I Would Do Differently
If I walked into that Converse standup again, I would spend the first 30 days doing exactly one thing. Listening. One-on-ones at every layer. Not to build allies. Not to gather ammunition for the plan I was already forming. Just to hear the war stories, understand where the dead bodies are buried, and develop my own perspective instead of inheriting someone else's.
By day 30, you know who the historians are. By day 60, you have heard enough to distinguish the signal from the noise. By day 90, you have a framework built from actual data, not from whoever was loudest in week one. And critically, that framework is built with the team, not handed down to them.
The other thing I would do is get to data faster. When there is finger-pointing in an organization, and there usually is, the fastest way out of it is to stop arguing about the narrative and start arguing about the numbers. Data creates contracts. Contracts create accountability. Accountability is much harder to argue with than opinion, even very loud opinion.
The 50-person standup was not a symptom of a broken team. It was a symptom of a team that had been handed a process from above and had never been given the space to tell anyone it wasn't working. The historians in that room knew that. They had known it for years.
I just hadn't earned the right to hear it yet.
The team you're inheriting already knows what's broken. They're waiting to see if you're the kind of leader worth telling.
One email a week from The Builder's Leader. The frameworks, the blind spots, and the conversations most leaders avoid. Subscribe for free.